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It snowed another four inches last night in New Haven, and this morning that accumulation was being covered with an unrelenting sleet. As 17th-century British scholar James Howell would have said (echoed later by the esteemed W.C. Fields), “Not fit for man nor beast.” Literally, it seems, as even my faithful dog refused to go out for his morning walk with me. He simply raised one eyelid, rolled over and returned to his puppy-dog dreams. As I waited at the bus stop with two other hopefuls wrapped up like Inuit fishermen, wondering if the buses would brave the icy roads, my thoughts turned to my new job in California.

The anticipation of moving to Stanford reminds me of the excitement I felt during my first publishing internship.

I was out at Stanford just last week, searching for an apartment in a housing market that can only be described as having lost all touch with reality, much less reason. The highlight of the trip was meeting my future colleagues at their monthly “Cake Day.” A misnomer, as there sadly was no cake in sight, though there was pie, in the form of pizza, and one of the warmest groups of colleagues anyone could hope for. They interrupted their work for food and conversation, to announce their award-winning books and forthcoming improvements to the office, and to introduce me. I would have liked to stay there for hours chatting with each of them about their own challenges and dreams.

The antiquated technology of the American credit card makes it vulnerable to theft.

Following recent massive credit card data theft at several national retailers, everyone, including Congress, is suddenly worried about cyber security. Cyber thieves made off with the credit card data of 40 million customers at Target’s U.S. stores during the pre-holiday shopping season. The company later said the personal information of 70 million people was also taken, including names, contact information and personal buying history dating as far back as 10 years. Neiman Marcus and several national hotel chains have also reportedly been targeted.

In the ensuing squabble, the banks are pointing fingers at retailers for not securing their communication channels. But the retailers, in turn, criticize banks for issuing theft-prone swipe-and-sign credit cards, which can be distinguished by the magnetic stripe on the back. If you’re looking for an example of such a card, look no further than your own wallet—virtually all US-issued credit cards are of the swipe-and-sign variety.

When a purchase is made with a swipe-and-sign card, a signal is sent to the bank that issued the card to authorize the purchase at the point-of-sale. It is during this exchange of information between the bank and the retailer that criminals can intervene.

When a purchase is made with a swipe-and-sign card, a signal is sent to the bank that issued the card to authorize the purchase at the point-of-sale. It is during this exchange of information between the bank and the retailer that criminals can intervene.

As Bahrain experienced paroxysms of revolt in the midst of the Arab Spring, Toby Matthiesen was on the ground in the small island kingdom, watching the events of 2011 unfold.

Inspired by the domino-chain of the Arab Spring, in 2011 Bahrainis rallied for political reform. Last week marked the three-year anniversary of the start of what have now become ongoing protests, a benchmark which thousands of Bahrainis observed by taking to the streets. Unlike Libya and Egypt, the political aspirations of Bahrain’s protesters (which run the gamut from moderate reform to complete regime-change) remain largely unsatisfied, and on the eve of February 14, 2014, 29 protesters were arrested in police clashes. Meanwhile dialogue between the ruling family and oppositional groups is stymied by sectarian antipathy between Sunni and Shia—a schism that undergirds much of the country’s instability.

“As I got into the taxi, I wondered what the discussion with the driver would bring, and if, like many modern travelers, I would see his opinions as representative of the current state of the country, if they would confirm what I had read previously about the region. From the ring the cab driver wore on his right hand, I knew that he was Shia. The ring, which can be made of various gemstones and has references to the oneness of God engraved, was a tradition first established by Shia imams. When I asked him about this, he looked puzzled. His typical foreign customers—Western businessmen, oil workers, and soldiers—generally were not interested in local religious and political affairs. He replied with a lowered voice, ‘Yes I am a Shia, we are the majority in this country, but the ruling family is Sunni. Therefore, we have many problems with them.’ I would learn much more about the history and politics of the Gulf Shia over the next years, but even this first conversation made me wonder whether the political marginalization of the Gulf Shia was not a ticking time bomb.” (Sectarian Gulf, 4)

In a recent article for the Middle East Research and Information Project Matthiesen attributes the unrest that erupted in 2011 to decades of neoliberal economics that produced a have/have-not dichotomy that fell, in large part, along sectarian fault lines, with the Sunni royal family and a handful of prominent business families (also largely Sunni) comprising the haves, and the Shia-majority making up the beleaguered proletariat.

Matthiesen maintains that Bahrain’s more oil-rich neighbors have been able to recycle petroleum profits into high salaries for the civil service sector and “cushion the blows of neoliberalism” for the non-élite. Without a comparable revenue stream, not only was Bahrain not able to quell working class unrest, but the government added metaphoric oil to the fire, by importing cheap labor (mostly Sunni immigrants from poorer South Asian and Arab countries) to undercut the domestic (and predominantly Shia) work force.

When he visited Bahrain again in February 2011—three years after his conversation with the Shia cab driver—a Facebook page calling for a Day of Rage in the capital city had amassed thousands of followers. By the time Matthiesen arrived, large-scale protests, consisting mostly of Shia Bahrainis and a smattering of Sunni opposition groups, were already underway in Manama.

After a few days of mostly peaceful protest, security forces began a sudden battery of violent crackdowns on February 17, 2011, to disperse the dissidents.

“Shocked by the sudden turn of events, I stayed in my hotel room that day, as Bahrain television was urging people to stay away from busy intersections and my friends were not answering their phones. From a jubilant mood, Bahrain had moved to a state of lockdown. The other guests were leaving the hotel, and soon I was almost the only one there. The South-Asian employees at the hotel were scared. When I asked one waiter from Kerala about his opinion, he replied, ‘It’s the Shia, they always make trouble. They don’t like the ruling family, and they want to take our jobs. They don’t like us, they want all foreigners to leave. But the country works because of us; if we were not here nothing would function.’” (Sectarian Gulf, 34)

The Kerala-native waiter’s comments represent a pervasive attitude shared by many Bahraini immigrants (most of whom are Sunnis from poorer South Asian and Arab countries), whose migration and assimilation are frequently expedited by sponsors inside the regime and, as a result, harbored sympathies for the existing government.

In Sectarian Gulf, while Matthiesen distills the cultural perceptions and stereotypes that inform the Shia and Sunni’s schismatic opinions of one another, he develops the case that the original protest movement was significantly less divided by creed than it eventually came to be in the intervening years. But, as Matthiesen reveals in his book, a perfect storm of factors reified the Shia-Sunni divide creating the diplomatic gridlock that has frustrated reform and reconciliation ever since.

As popular uprisings spread across the Middle East, popular wisdom often held that the Gulf States would remain beyond the fray. In Sectarian Gulf, Toby Matthiesen paints a very different picture, offering the first assessment of the Arab Spring across the Gulf region with first-hand accounts of events in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.

The following guest post from Paul C. Godfrey is the third in a series of blog posts reflecting on the War on Poverty, half a century after its inception. See the rest of the series here.

Scientists love natural experiments; something happens to one group of people but not to another group with the same basic characteristics. Natural experiments allow scientists to clearly see how interventions impact divergent outcomes between otherwise similar groups. The Great Smoky Mountains study of mental health among rural North Carolina residents was just such an experiment; one that came to powerful conclusions.

The study began in 1993 and followed a cohort of Cherokee and non-Cherokee children until they were all 19 or 21. Each Cherokee received a share of the profits from the reservation’s casino, which by 2006 totaled about $9,000 per person. Non-rural study participants received no such payment. Dr. Jane Costello and her team wondered “did the increased income have any effect on the mental health of Cherokee children?”

The Great Smoky Mountain Study

In 2003, the team reported their first results; the extra income improved the mental health of Cherokee children, they showed lower levels of mental health disorders than non-Cherokee children. The team found that one characteristic in particular mediated the link between increased income and mental health: the level of family supervision. When parents actively watched over and cared for the children, they experienced significantly fewer mental health challenges but families with lax parental involvement exhibited no difference from the non-Cherokee cohort. Increased income only helped those families already committed to the welfare of their children!

Costello and her team published more results in the top-drawer Journal of the American Medical Association in 2010. These findings showed the lasting impact of the extra income as those children became adults. The mental health of the Cherokee continued to exceed that of the non-Cherokee cohort. The question of interest this time was the differences among the Cherokee children themselves. Would those who enjoyed the additional income the longest (the youngest at the time of the initial study) have a lower incidence of mental health challenges than the oldest children? The answer was a clear yes!

Were there mediating factors, just like in the first study? Yes, particularly in terms of substance abuse problems. The team wrote: “In adulthood, fewer delinquent friends mediated the relationship between the family [income] supplement and adult substance use disorders. Possibly, the increased supervision in adolescence, while no longer exerting a direct influence on adult psychopathology, helped keep young adults away from delinquent friends and thence exposure to drugs as adults.”

It wasn’t just the money that made the difference! Over time, a strong family and good friends—two manifestations of social capital—significantly influenced whether increased income improved mental health. For youth, involved parents meant that the extra income had a positive impact. For adults, good friends made the difference. The family’s influence seems to extend into adulthood; strong parents teach their children how to select good friends.

Why Social Capital Matters

Social capital provides access to important resources through associations and relationships. Those resources may be economic such as access to seed capital or customers from family and friends. They may be knowledge or skill, such as learning to budget by watching one’s parents. Relationships provide psychic resources, such as the sense of love and belonging that come from affectionate connections. Finally, social capital provides moral resources, such as the values of honesty, hard work, perseverance, and self-discipline that help individuals improve their lives and flourish.

How does social capital help eliminate poverty? Social capital matters because our associations help form and reinforce the types of attitudes and behaviors that people need to succeed. Social relationships create a “turbocharger” effect that amplifies the impact of money. Second, the world in which we live is so complex and difficult that none of us can succeed on our own. It takes a village to raise a child—or to help an adult raise himself out of poverty. The resources we access through our social networks extend the impact of money and other resources.

Costello’s work shows that it takes more than money to move from poverty to prosperity: social capital counts. Where have you seen the power of social capital? How has it helped you amplify and extend the value of money?

Paul C. Godfrey is Professor of Strategy and Associate Academic Director of the Melvin J. Ballard Center for Economic Self-Reliance at Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management. He has recently pursued projects in Ghana, the Navajo Nation, and with disadvantaged populations in the United States.

His new book More than Moneyis a timely guide on how organizations can create prosperity for people at the base of the pyramid in the developing and developed world.

A new book by an award-winning legal scholar poses a timely and provocative challenge: if blind people aren’t colorblind, who can be?

The following article appeared originally in the UC Hastings alumni magazine. You can read the Q&A with Obasogie on the online version of their magazine here.

Innovative research led UC Hastings Professor Osagie K. Obasogie to win the Law and Society Association’s inaugural John Hope Franklin prize for outstanding scholarship in 2011 and to write Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, available from Stanford University Press in November.

Professor Obasogie, who has a PhD in sociology as well as a JD, does research that attempts to bridge the gaps between empirical and doctrinal scholarship on race. In the following interview, he discusses his findings along with some of the broader implications of his cross-disciplinary work.

It started around 2005, after I saw Ray, a feature film on the life of Ray Charles. Even though Charles became blind very early in life, I was struck by how he had a strong understanding of race—what race is, how it affected his life and other people’s lives.

After seeing the movie, I did research to see what was in the published literature about blind people’s understanding of race. I assumed that people had already written on this topic, and I wanted to learn more. However, I didn’t find anything. I wasn’t able to find anyone who had simply asked blind people: What is race? What are your experiences with race? How do you think about race? This oversight reflects the deep assumption we have in society that race is a visual phenomenon that blind people aren’t able to understand and that race is not a significant part of their lives.

Just like everybody else. More often than not, blind respondents talked about race in terms of skin color, facial features, and other visual cues—just like sighted people. To be clear, my research focused on people who have been totally blind since birth. These were people who hadn’t seen anything, let alone the visual cues that sighed people associate with race.

Some blind people wouldn’t date outside their race while others didn’t want to live in neighborhoods that were deemed to be different from where a person of their race should live. One blind respondent said “Most black people look pretty much the same;” another said blacks’ skin “wasn’t as smooth” as whites; others said blacks and Hispanics “had a distinctive odor.” Still others recalled how family members acquainted them with racial slurs and to whom, exactly, they apply. But the common theme among the blind respondents is that they understood race visually.

Yes and no. The research showed that blind people often distrust these nonvisual cues. A number of blind respondents said they had been wrong enough times by mistakenly relying on voice that they no longer use vocal differences as a key indicator of racial difference. Voice can play a secondary role, but race is primarily understood in terms of visual differences.

Moreover, several respondents said they appreciated my research because they had experiences where sighted people assumed that because they were blind that they were also colorblind—in a sense, that race was not important to them. Some sighted people even thought that blind people were fortunate because they didn’t have to deal with the messy world of race.

Our courts, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, are moving toward colorblindness, which is the idea that government should not take race into consideration in any type of decision making—whether it is for benign, beneficial, or harmful purposes—such as affirmative action to make up for past harms that have been perpetuated against a group—with the invidious use of racial categories to subordinate a group.

The basic idea behind colorblindness is that any consideration of race by the government is bad and that we will only have a fair, just, and equitable society once we get beyond race. But for me, the question is, what does it mean to get beyond it? Do we get beyond it by, in a sense, having the court limit the government’s ability to use racial categories to address persisting inequalities? Or does government need to acknowledge race to level the playing field? Which still leaves open the question that, given our country’s long and pathetic history with race, is getting beyond race even possible? Doing research with blind people about race is a way to take the colorblind metaphor seriously in terms of understanding whether its underlying assumption—that blindness produces a diminished understanding of race and inhibits racial antagonisms—is accurate as an empirical matter.

I think colorblindness is a noble idea, but so are unicorns and tooth fairies. The data show that it is simply a misleading and, indeed, harmful way to frame how race plays out in today’s society. As evidenced in my book and research, race isn’t important just because it’s visually obvious, the sum of mere physical traits. Rather, it’s important because we’re socialized to experience race in a particular way, to give significance to certain cues, to orient our lives around certain features and react to those differences. And this social aspect is so strong the even blind people “see” race. My hope is that these research findings can help inform and change the conversation about race and lead to more thoughtful laws and policies that focus on the social dynamics of racial subordination rather than assuming that racial difference is natural or self-evident.

I hope my work will help give the courts pause before using colorblindness as an interpretive tool. Before we give up on the idea of the government using racial categories to atone for past and ongoing harms done to minorities, we must appreciate the extent to which society is still reproducing racial ideologies and entrenching racial hierarchies in ways that can have harmful effects on these groups. A deeper understanding of these complexities may lead the court to think twice before giving up on affirmative action or other similar initiatives. Otherwise, it is complicit in maintaining inequality.

Put differently, if blind folks are still seeing race and acting on it in a manner that is problematic, you can be sure sighted folks are as well. Race is still a central problem in our society, and we’re not going to get beyond it by simply sticking our head in the sand and acting like it no longer exists.

Osagie K. Obasogie is Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. His research and writing spans Constitutional law, bioethics, sociology of law, and reproductive and genetic technologies. He is the author of Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind(Stanford, 2013) and the upcoming Beyond Bioethics: Towards a New Biopolitcs (University of California).

Thirty-five years ago today I was living in Iran, in the (then) small village of Aliabad, when the 1979 Revolution, which would culminate in the overthrow of the Shah, first began. As I reflect on the Revolution, I think about the people of Aliabad, with whom I shared the experience.

In typical anthropological-participant-observation fashion, I joined in revolutionary marches both in the village and nearby Shiraz, with the other women and girls of the village—sometimes carrying my then one-year-old daughter. Along with other residents of the settlement, I felt fear, anxiety, distress, grief, anger, exhilaration—and all of the other emotions that went along with living through a revolution.

We woke up in the morning, anxious to find out what was happening across the country, wondering apprehensively what the day would bring. We listened to the BBC Persian news service and talked about the ongoing conflict with whomever we met. For years afterward, all of the revolutionary experiences and discussions seemed burned into my memory. Even after going through the depression, grief, and disillusionment of the following years (also felt by Iranian American friends) the 18 months I spent in Iran between June 1978 and December 1979 remain the most gripping period of my life.

During the process of anthropological fieldwork, the researcher usually develops close relationships with the people she lives among. Since we went through a revolution together, perhaps I feel all the closer to my Aliabad friends. These people take central stage in my day-to-day social interactions in the field, as well as in my mind, memory, and even my dreams, when I’m back home. Fortunately I’ve managed to keep in touch with some of them. Along with other older people from that community, I sometimes think back to old times, bemoan the current materialistic attitudes with fewer interactions among relatives, and feel nostalgic for the lifestyle of those days. Desire to see old friends, a wish to rejoin a community very dear to me, and curiosity—personal and scholarly—about ongoing developments, means that time spent in Aliabad and Shiraz with friends is precious to me.

One of the effects of long-term participant observation is that the anthropologist becomes very attached to many people in the research community. In my view, participant observation is very much a joint project, a collaborative effort. During the fieldwork process, the researcher learns from people, and the abilities of the people with whom the scholar works dramatically affect the research project.

I had the generous help of many gifted observers and analysts who shared the results of their watching, thinking, and understanding with me, and am still awed by the analytical abilities and nuanced understandings of political, economic, and social conditions of many Aliabad residents. For their insights and generosity, I am not adequately able to convey my gratitude.

People do seem pleased to have their experiences documented in print. During my 1978-1979 stay, I remember one young man asking me to write and tell people about it all. With the publication of Days of Revolution, I hope to have accomplished just that. Another small way I have found of saying ‘thank you’ is to give people photographs. In 1978-79, people tell me, I owned one of only two cameras in the village of some 3,000 people. I only wish I had taken more photos then. A financially strapped graduate student at the time, I did not even spare the funds to buy a flash attachment and was limited to outdoor shots.

During more recent visits, I have taken many more photos and always share a copy with the people in them. When I go back, people ask me for photos from 1978-79, pictures of deceased family, men working on farms, and so on. A few times, I have had all of them—even multiple copies of each—but it is never enough. I am always asked to bring more.

For the 35th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, I thought I would share some of these old photos in this blog. I dedicate this writing and these photographs to my friends in Aliabad and Shiraz and to the memory of those friends and teachers from there who are no longer with us.

(In order to put photos of women on social media, I would need to have prior permission, so unfortunately, you will not see photos of Aliabad women).

Mary Elaine Hegland is Professor of Anthropology at Santa Clara University. She was the only American scholar in Iran conducting field research during the Islamic Revolution, and one of very few to have access to the country in the 35 years since. She is the author of Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village.

The free flow of information and bodies across borders is an increasing trend so pervasive that the word citizen has betrayed its etymological roots by going "global" to give us the now famous, global citizen. In the era of globalization Susan Ossman turns her anthropological study to the lives and journeys of serial migrants.

Travel and mobility are increasingly easy for many people: yet “immigrants” are perceived as a major political problem the world over. Notions of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism have developed to account for emerging forms of political and social consciousness, but how are these “perspectives” produced by actual experiences of travel or migration and the diverse social and institutional arrangements people on the move encounter?

Writers like the border-straddling V.S. Naipul, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, and Junot Díaz encourage us to think about these questions. Similarly intrigued by stories of immigration and perplexed by how they rarely jibed with theoretical accounts of the global nomad or cosmopolitan, Susan Ossman chose not to focus on any ethnic group or metropolitan site in her research but instead, on serial migrants. She found that people who have lived in several countries not only have fascinating stories, but tell them in a similar manner. Although their backgrounds and the places they have lived are remarkably diverse their shared experience of being immigrants and then immigrating again leads them to have a lot in common; it also distinguishes them from others, be they those who never migrate, immigrants or the kinds of frequent travelers and global nomads portrayed in images that seek to represent globalization. When Moving Matterswas published last year it set in motion a new paradigm for research on mobility, but it also inspired artists, actors, writers and musicians whose lives have stretched across countries and continents to join in Moving Matters:A Traveling Workshop. Taking Ossman’s book as a point of departure, they progressively develop artworks in venues across the world, as though retracing their experiences of serial migration.

The following video is a brief sampler of the recent workshop at the Pavillion Vendome in Clichy, France:

It’s February—winter slush decays in the curbs, and the last of the polar vortex exhales its way out of our weather systems. Spring is nearly upon us, along with its attendant rituals, including the ever-rejuvenating spring cleaning. Next month we’re doing a little shelf-dusting of our own at SUP: we’ll be holding our 2014 overstock sale featuring some deeply discounted titles. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more details on the sale. Also, if you missed it, check out our 2013 Book Awards roundup to see some award-winning nonfiction across a wide spectrum of disciplines. Now, here’s a quick look at what’s new and forthcoming this month:

“Brouillette has written what will quickly become the definitive account of contemporary British literature—and of the now pandemic effort to monetize creativity. Over the last twenty years, management gurus, policy wonks, and academics of all stripes have set out to calculate the value of self-expression, both to local and national economies and the legions of precarious workers now encouraged to style themselves self-promoting entrepreneurs.”

"With verve and compelling evidence, Alya Guseva and Akos Rona-Tas guide us into the intricate world of credit and debit cards in eight post-communist countries. Along the way, Plastic Money boldly demolishes myths about how markets, money, and globalization work. An inspired contribution to economic sociology."

"Cognition and behavior are increasingly used as variables in social network theory, but Moldoveanu and Baum leapfrog evolution to analyze the purely cognitive underpinnings of social networks. Your epinet refers to your understanding of how other people see you and one another within your network. Combining network analysis with the reflected self- and emotional intelligence, Epinets serves up a buffet of innovation and insight."

—Ronald S. Burt, Hobart W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

"'Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Yose were walking on the road.' Traditional commentators ignore the Zohar's narrative framework; in this fascinating book, David Greenstein refocuses our attention on this vital element. He demonstrates how the 'walking motif' enables theZohar to address the mundane, to explore not just the 'sacred center,' but also its everyday periphery."

Written in lyrical Aramaic, this masterpiece of Kabbalah exceeds the dimensions of a normal book; it is virtually a body of mystical literature, comprising over twenty sections. The bulk of the Zohar consists of mystical interpretation of the Torah, from Genesis through Deuteronomy. This eighth volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition consists of commentary on the end of Leviticus and the beginning of Numbers.

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